


Clara Descending

by Radiolaria



Series: Meta Essays [13]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Afterlife, Archived From Tumblr, Archived From onaperduamedee Blog, Canonical Character Death, Death, F/M, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Greek and Roman Mythology - Freeform, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 17:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16937388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: A reflection on Clara and Danny's story through the lens of Orpheus and Eurydice.





	Clara Descending

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on Oct. 26, 2015 on [onaperduamedee](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/131923842643/do-you-already-notice-the-similarities-that) as part of a discussion with [tillthenexttimedoctor](http://tillthenexttimedoctor.tumblr.com/post/131674872272/do-you-already-notice-the-similarities-that) regarding the Orpheus & Eurydice theme in Clara and Danny's story.

I would agree with Julia concerning the writer’s intention. Writing does not happen in a vacuum. Moffat is familiar with the way death, devotion and descending to the underworld have been used through ages in fiction. It is a proper trope in many religions and mythologies that has survived in fiction: _katábasis_ , a descent performed by the hero, often in the underworld.

You could think of Orpheus and Eurydice naturally (and they’re not even the only ones in Greco-Roman mythology to go on such a hike, see Aeneas and his father Anchises, Psyche and Eros, Demeter and Persephone), but also Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim in Sumerian mythology, Izanagi and Izanami in Shinto mythology, Lemminkäinen and his mother in Finnish mythology, Hunahpu and Xbalanque in Mayan Mythology to name but a few…

And Dante in the _Divine Comedy_ completes __katábasis_ _ and _anabasis_ – the journey home-, Faust in Goethe’s second _Faust_ makes the trip for a Spartan princess, Lyra in Pullman’s _The Amber Spyglass_  visits her friend Roger in the underworld, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1946 movie, _A Matter of Life and Death,_ tells of a double __katábasis_ _ (I mention them in particular because I am quite sure _Dark Water/Death in Heaven_ is a nod to the film), Disney’s _Hercules_ even contains a __katábasis_ _ different from the one in the actual myth. **It is _that_ sewn in the fabric of our stories. **

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice itself has been rewritten so many times (Virgil, Ovid, both probably inspired by anterior authors and legends; Boethius, Calzabigi for Gluck, Anouilh…) with sometimes contrary or ambiguous outcomes (Moschos, even prior to Ovid and Virgil; Calzabigi), that attempting to mirror anything becomes absurd. Sometimes Eurydice is completely silent and little more than the contemporary  _woman fridged_ (Ovid), sometimes she blatantly refuses to be picked up by her lover (Hilda Doolittle), sometimes Orpheus is the one to change his mind (Anouilh) or is too cowardly to save her (Plato). It’s a bit of a mess. To the point where the question is not so much whether or not Steven Moffat was trying to mirror the myth, but what the story of Clara and Danny brings to the overall trope.

Clara and Danny have an advantage: their tale is woven into a universe that is already imbued with the Orphic/katabatictheme. Moffat is _arguably_ famous for bringing people back from the dead, but the existence of hell is the heart of the myth and Moffat has tons of afterlives. Moffat doesn’t believe in an afterlife and substitutes hell/heaven with a prison ruled, not by gods, but by laws that cannot be overcome with singing. There is trace of it in _The Doctor Dances_ where the dead are turned into puppets, but it is more evident in _Forest of the Dead_ , _Asylum of the Daleks_ , _The Bells of Saint John_ and finally _Death in Heaven_.

In Moffat’s world, there is no God to sing to and to charm into releasing the dead. There are rules, physical and ethical. Danny’s body and mind have been deteriorated and have been taken over by the very thing that allows him to appear still alive, just like the mere appearance of all the Eurydices before their Orphei (?) owes everything to them being in a hell that allows physicality.

Clara looks at Danny and sees the man she loves, but his appearance also clearly marks him as belonging to the underworld –like Persephone marked by the fruits she ate. This is an interesting transfer: as looking back at Eurydice leads to her condemnation (or rest, depending) through divine rule, Clara bearing witness to Danny’s appearance seals his fate through Clara’s nature. Clara cannot and will not rewrite time and she cannot revive Danny; keeping him in this state is not an option for her. She has to let him go. And Danny, following the steps of other Eurydices before him, does not deny his belonging to the underworld, even claims it:

> _I’m already dead. You’re here this time at least._

And reclaims it by saving countless lives, and Clara, and their last moments together. Eurydice has little agency in her misfortunes; not Danny Pink, who reshapes an accidental death into a sacrifice, unlike Eurydice.

The notion of reshaping goes even further than that: by dying, Eurydice escapes married life, domesticity, a certain _literary_ death by the habituation of her lover. In a common literary (and sadly overused) trope, Eurydice dead is also Eurydice lovingly sung and written into legend by the very same lover who would have looked past her in old age.

Clara, much like a poet, had woven a story around Danny and her, around their love and future together. Danny’s death cut it short, as well as the chances Clara had to endanger and possibly destroy it by telling the truth and merely _living_ (to the dregs) the story with Danny. It’s hazardous to guess what path Clara might have taken had Danny lived, but I think it’s fair to assume Clara’s daredevil nature wouldn’t have been curbed for Danny. And the love story, lost to life (Anouilh goes there, with devastating effects); Clara’s life as she chose it.

Clara stands too wild, too unruly and indomitable as she is to prevent a possible commitment to Danny from turning into shackles.

Yes, there is certain ruthlessness to this reading, but I don’t think Eurydice is meant to be treated kindly by any version; she’s a martyr to vanity and ego. And Clara and Danny’s story reflects it in a beautiful way. Not only does Danny manage to reclaim agency by saving everyone (and this is incidentally why I don’t think Danny giving his ride back to life to the little boy at the last moment works as well as it should), but also the lines are much more blurred between who is who.

A number of declensions of the myth will make a monster of the dead lover. Dying changes people. Quite physically. Take Izanagi and Izanami, two primordial gods in the Shinto religion; married and in love and parents of the Japan Islands. After Izanami’s premature death, her husband Izanagi went to reclaim her from Yomi’s gods in the underworld, but, too eager to see his wife, sought her on his own further deep only to find her rotting body. Izanami was furious of being seen in this state and chased him out of Yomi, which Izanagi cut off from the land of the living with a boulder, while his wife sent demons after him. Not so peaceful a Eurydice; quite a monster even.

Moffat is used to “monsterising” characters, to make them, in death, unwilling predators of loved ones: Danny comes after a long line of people who almost killed people they didn’t want to, even loved. Dead and being a monster are quite indistinguishable for him. Except in Moffat’s story, Danny turns out to be the more human in the couple. Danny saved the world and sealed the underworld over by destroying Missy’s operation : Izanami dead remains a deity, a force of equilibrium, like Osiris, like Persephone. At worse, Orpheus turning back was a deliberate mistake brought by a refusal to commit; with “killing” Danny, Clara starts a chain of event that is less favourable to her. She becomes judge and executioner of the Mistress, before the Brigadier intervened. Very much god-like in those instants she was ready to kill an ageless goddess she knew to be her best friend’s friend, demanding the execution to that same friend.

Those scenes are steeling in what they reveal about Clara, moments after she painfully defeated her love and ego, to let go of Danny, as he had asked. As I said, Orpheus is crueller to his Eurydice than Clara, but certainly not to the world. He ends his life singing his sorrow to the sky and rocks, then torn apart by women, while Clara surely becomes the furies. Interestingly, Plato gave a religious sense to Orpheus’ death; he had defied the laws of death and was thus punished by the gods.

Undead Danny may have been monstrous, but monsters are warning signs. Especially for story-tellers and poets who fancy themselves as gods…

And that’s just one way of reading it. So many versions. The important part is: we have a very clear _katábasis,_ which means transgressive journey, a cost for the one living, and an underworld that worryingly managed to make an appearance in _The Woman Who Lived_.

Whether it was done intentionally is of little importance: Moffat chose to write that story, nurtured with all the stories he must have had at the back of his mind and that we inevitably have, whatever the source. He knew his story would only add to the layers on layers of heroes descending.


End file.
